Fleury: JBoss to scale its business

Look for JBoss to scale its business now that it has the backing of Red Hat, JBoss Chairman and CEO Marc Fleury said on Wednesday.

Fleury, who will be senior vice president and general manager of the JBoss division at Red Hat, spoke out on a number of topics related to the planned $350 million merger, which was announced on Monday.

“You’re going to see a new level of scalability from us, and that takes investment,” Fleury said. The company seeks to build out its JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, in particular.

Red Hat, with JBoss on board, is “the biggest independent open source vendor,” he said. The two organizations share a developer-centric culture, Fleury said.

Asked about widespread rumors of Oracle’s interest in acquiring JBoss, Fleury declined to discuss Oracle, specifically.

“I cannot talk about that,” Fleury said. However, there were many options for JBoss, including mergers and an initial public offering. One offer even would have paid JBoss to remain independent. But JBoss decided that being acquired by Red Hat was the best option because it would infuse capital right away to enable JBoss to expand its business, Fleury said.

Fleury also lashed out at BEA Systems over reports that BEA turned down an opportunity to acquire JBoss. He said he would have never sold to BEA.

JBoss itself is financially health, Fleury said. Red Hat in a statement said it expects JBoss to achieve $48 million in revenue in 2006 and $80 million in 2007. Although the company had “negative free cash flow” of $5.3 million in 2005, revenues are growing faster than expenses, according to Red Hat.

JBoss’s acquisition by Red Hat has raised questions about IBM’s close relationship with Red Hat, given that IBM offers middleware that competes with JBoss. Fleury, however, expects IBM to continue working with Linux vendors.

“The feeling I get from the Red Hat side is this should not effect [the Linux business],” Fleury said.

He also hopes to continue working with Microsoft, which also is a competitor with Red Hat. Microsoft and JBoss announced an interoperability arrangement in September.

“I think they received the news with interest and almost amusement,” he said.

Fleury also denied the notion that JBoss only allows code contributions from within the company. Many individuals contribute, he said.

As far as the merger’s impact on other open source application servers, such as Apache Geronimo or JOnAS, Fleury said he did not think the deal would change much for those offerings as far as market penetration.